


it's what they do

by Estrella3791



Category: Justice League (2017)
Genre: F/M, Pfft what's that, They're a team, This is what happened when I thought about that for too long, editing, they have feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-02 01:52:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17878841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estrella3791/pseuds/Estrella3791
Summary: Everyone handles it differently.The stress, the hurt, the grief - they all have different coping mechanisms.Diana doesn't think that any of them deal with it the way they should.





	it's what they do

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who watched Justice League and fell in love with everyone in different ways???
> 
> (It's me.)
> 
> So here is my first venture into the DC fandom. I know literally nothing about this universe, so have fun with my mangling of everything. 
> 
> Also, I'm using the all lowercase title thing, and feel very trendy. All the incredibly good fics I've read lately - you know, the ones that make you turn your phone off and stare at the wall and cry and wonder how anyone can use words like that - have had lowercase titles, and I'm doing that to make my not-great use of words go down easier.
> 
> Probably it won't work, but that's fine.
> 
> I've never done a lot of editing, and nowhere is that more painfully obvious then here, but I kind of want to just post this so that's what I'm doing.
> 
> Anyway, yes! I'm done rambling. 
> 
> Enjoy!!!

Diana remembers.

 

Barry barely even acknowledges that it happens, running from his actions and their consequences faster than his body can move. He hates the pain, the screams, the hurt. And no one can blame him, because he is young, so young, so much younger than anyone should be when they start dealing with battles and blood. 

She sees it in his eyes while they clean up after a mission.

She sees it in his face, when Arthur or Bruce nonchalantly mention ‘taking care of someone,’ because Barry loves taking care of people, but not in that kind of way. 

(He’s brought her ice cream and pizza and more romantic comedies than she’s watched in the past hundred years put together, when he thinks she’s feeling down.

And he’s usually right.

And it always makes her feel better.)

And she hears it in the screams, when they all stay the night at Wayne Manor because no one feels like they have what it takes to go home. Bruce never has to tell Alfred to make up the guest rooms, because Alfred is intuitive and always has them made up already, and they all crash until they no longer feel like burning.

And there are screams that echo through the halls, and they are Barry’s.

Neither she nor he ever mention those late night lullabies that she sings to him, or the way that he clutches for her. His sleep-clouded mind mistakes her for the mother that he lost so many years ago, and she stays with him until his breathing is even and the tears that she’s wiped from his face no longer remain in his quivering eyelids.

He tries, so hard, to pretend like nothing’s wrong. She knows that he wants to be strong, to prove that he belongs as part of the team, but he’s also young – so young – and unable to process what they do. 

So he doesn’t. He pretends it never happened.

That’s what Barry does.

 

Arthur both revels in the violence and recoils from it.

He has no qualms about kicking people, punching them, making them fly across the room and crunch into walls. Especially when he’s angry, which he often is. He doesn’t shy away from death. It doesn’t scare him.

Even though sometimes, she thinks, it should.

But she knows – she can read it on his face – that ghosts still haunt him. Not those of the people he’s killed, but of the people he didn’t save. 

Screams echo in his ears, screams that couldn’t register before because he was so busy kicking ass. 

Guilt drowns him, in the quiet moments when he isn’t thinking about anything. He isn’t scared of deep, dark, waves, especially since he can breathe in them, but this guilt, this regret, this shame, gives him a taste of what it’s like for everyone else to be caught beneath pounding, suffocating surf.

His eyes can be hard to read, given as they are to flickering between human and Atlantean, strong and vulnerable, playful and full of pain. There are lots of times that she doesn’t know if he’s upset, hurt, or amused, and she knows that he wants it that way. But there are times when she can see devastation written plainly on his face, and it makes her heart hurt a little bit because he blames himself. He’s so strong and so powerful and there was nothing he could do, no way that he could save that woman, that wheelchair-ridden senior, that teddybear-clutching child. 

It’s not your fault, she wants to say, but somehow never does. 

Arthur wants nothing except to live the life he always has.

So that’s what Arthur does.

 

Victor is an enigma, because he’s so human and so not at the same time. Sometimes she thinks that he only sees statistics, diagrams, flow charts and progress reports. Casualties are numbers on a screen, cold, impersonal facts that don’t have an impact.

Other times she looks at him and sees raw remorse beaming out of every red light, every electronic pulse. 

He’s human, and he’s not, and sometimes he can look past the deaths of innocents to see the good that it caused, and other times he gets overwhelmed with grief for the ones that never had a chance.

Once she tried to talk to him about it, but he pushed her away so quickly and with such force that she’s learned to give him space. He doesn’t want to do anything about his feelings; he wants to pretend that they’re not there and that he’s the cold and calculating machine that the world thinks he is.

So that’s what Victor does.

 

Clark, out of all of them, handles it the best, she thinks. He feels his grief and pain and guilt, lets it hurt and rage. He talks to families, cries with them, shows them that even though he’s Superman he can’t outrun the feelings, that emotions are powerful things and no one, not even Meta humans, can escape them.  
He feels the pain, the shame, the ravaging guilt that all of them experience after a mission where innocent bystanders lost their lives. 

And then he lets it go.

That’s what no one else has mastered, Diana thinks. No one else knows how to release the emotions that cling so tightly. No one knows how to admit that it’s not their fault without feeling like they’re invalidating the loss and the pain of the bereaved families. No one else knows how to not be responsible, because if it’s not their fault then whose fault is it?

Clark knows, but they don’t, and Diana doesn’t even know if they want to.

Clark doesn’t know what to do except what he’s always done.

So that’s what Clark does.

 

Bruce is the one that hangs onto it, lets the wash of shame and blame flow through him and fill him with anger.

(The anger is at himself or at the people he’s fighting and his parents and the man that killed them. He has so much anger and so little awareness of it. She tries to help, but it’s never easy to see your shortcomings, especially when you’ve worked so hard to get rid of them.

Bruce always shoves her roughly to the side.)

He doesn’t let go, he doesn’t feel, he doesn’t try to run. It’s like he’s stuck, frozen, immobile, incapable of getting better or worse. He’s marinating in negativity, and much as Diana wishes she could show him that it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s everyone’s (it’s no one’s), she can’t. He doesn’t want to be rescued. He wants to stay in his pit of hurt and blame and anger.

So that’s what Bruce does. 

She loves him, she thinks sometimes, and she wants to be able to pull him from where he’s wallowing, but there’s nothing she can do about it.

Except remember.

So she does.

 

She remembers those who died, and those who killed them. She remembers screams. She remembers tears. 

She remembers eyes filled with horror, eyes filled with anger, eyes filled with sadness, eyes filled with pain.

She feels the feeling of helplessness so acutely. She’s so painfully incapable of doing anything.

No one can fix this.

No one can heal this.

No one can turn back time and make it better.

She remembers the cool metal of a watch pressed into her hand, an ‘I love you.’ She remembers being torn apart from the inside out as she watched the clouds turn red with the blood of her love. 

She remembers that he saved that day so that she could save the world.

And it hurts, and it burns, and it gnaws at all of their insides, but that’s what the team’s job is. Saving the world.

So that’s what the team does.


End file.
